Think Beyond Your Limits

3 Simple Steps to Make Your Content Easy to Share

If you are posting content on your website or on social media, one of your goals is to get other people to share it. To maximize your reach, you must motivate your audience to spread your content. Obviously, that means you must be posting content that your readers find useful, entertaining or inspiring. But even with amazing content, you also need to make it easy for your audience to share it.

If you do not optimize your content for sharing, you lose a chance to reach beyond your audience. So take a few simple steps to not only inspire your readers to share, but to make it easier for them to do so.

1. Images

Images are a crucial element for sharing blogs and social media posts. Take a look at just a few statistics:

On Facebook, posts with images get an 87% interaction rate from fans (compared to a 4% interaction rate for other posts).

If you want people to share your content, you need to provide images that grab a reader’s attention. Be sure to avoid these mistakes:

a. No Thematic Image: Be sure to include an image that illustrates the theme of the post. For instance, the picture at the top of this post quickly tells the reader what to expect.

i. If you have no image (or if the only image is your photo, your logo, your product or an ad), your readers may not be inclined to repost or retweet or repin.

ii. Many times a blog post will contain multiple images that illustrate specific points in the blog. They may be screenshots or graphs or charts. These are essential for the text but they often do not work well when someone wants to repin, repost, or retweet. Give your sharers a strong general image to repost on their social media sites–not an image that does not make sense out of context.

b. Poor Quality Images: Make sure your image is attractive. You cannot guarantee that every image will look great wherever it is shared, but starting out with a well-proportioned, high-resolution image will make it easier for your viewers to share it.

If you need some free help in creating images for your posts, check out Canva. It is a great tool and the free version is easy to use and provides excellent results.

2. Easy to Read

Easy to read content is essential. Help your readers quickly recognize your key points to encourage them to comment and repost. An easy way to do this is to use headings and subheadings, numbers, bullets, and bold and italic text. For instance, if your title promises 6 ways to do something, then make sure that you number each item and provide a subheading or some bold text for easy identification.

3. Share Buttons

Share Buttons are essential for your website. Many websites only have buttons that allow viewers to like or follow the company on those social media sites where the company has a presence. But that is too limiting. Be sure to include share buttons for all of the major social platforms. For instance, just because you don’t have a Pinterest page does not mean that someone may not want to share your content on one of their Pinterest Boards.

You spend a great deal of time creating content to engage your audience. Be sure to take these easy steps to help them share it.

What else do you do to make it easier for people to share your content?